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A review by sakusha
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America by Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua
5.0
I loved the book. It was objective, compelling, interesting, and easy to read.
Argues that three traits make people succeed (8-11):
1. Superiority complex (belief in one’s ability to succeed)
2. Insecurity (drive to work hard to prove one’s worth or to acquire wealth and security)
3. Impulse control (self discipline, ability to control oneself, deferring gratification). “If people are made to do almost any impulse-controlling task—even as simple as getting themselves to sit up straight—on a regular basis for even a few weeks, their overall willpower increases. Suddenly they’re stronger in all kinds of unrelated activities that also require concentration, perseverance, or temptation resistance” (133).
These qualities tend to be high in immigrants, and dissipate by the third generation (2).
Here are the highest performing groups (not in any order):
Mormons (30)
Jews (51) have a median household income of $97,000-98,000 per year (53)
Huguenots (French protestants) (20)
Iranians (89) - median household income of $68,000 (56)
Lebanese - stats not given (57)
*Cuban Exiles which came to the US in 1959-1973 (36), but not the Cuban Marielitos who came in 1980. “The Cuban Exile community is mostly white, whereas a substantial fraction of the Marielitos and post-1990 New Cubans were black or of mixed race” (40).
*Nigerians - doing better than the national average but not one of the top income earners (42-43). Their median annual household income is $58,000, and the national median across all races is $51,000 (44). (I notice that Nigeria is one of the 5 African countries which has an average IQ over 83, the other four being Uganda, Eritrea, Morocco, & Sierra Leone)
*Indians (41, 95) excel in science and spelling bees (46-47). Indians have the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US at $90,500 per year (48).
Newer data on median household income by race in the US is different than the data listed in the book, but Indians remain the highest earners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
This site says Indian IQ is only 82.2:
http://aristocratsofthesoul.com/average-iq-by-race-and-ethnicity/
But explains their high income levels by say the discrepancy is probably due to selective immigration policies. (The 287 million illiterate adults in India are not the ones filling out immigration paperwork and now working high-tech jobs in the U.S.)
*Asians - particularly Chinese (Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodians don’t do well) (45). Asians “constitute 30-50% of the student bodies at the country’s leading music programs” (46). Chinese and Koreans excel in science and music (46-47). Asians are 5% of the US college-age population, but they make up 19% of undergrads at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Suspicious that they have all the same percentage. “If admissions were based solely on National Merit Scholarship and SAT scores, these percentages would be even higher” (47). “At CalTech, said to base admissions solely on academic criteria, nearly 40% of the students are Asian” (48). Taiwanese have the next highest household income of any ethnic group in the US (48).
Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan accepts students based solely on standardized test scores. . . . In 2013, the school’s new admittees consisted of 9 black children, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, and 620 Asians” (169-170). These Asians’ success can’t be explained by growing up in affluent households. “The Chinese parents in Sunset Park sending their children to Stuyvesant don’t tend to have PhDs; they’re more likely to be restaurant or factory workers” (171). “In 2012, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal complaint against the city, objecting to the vast underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics, and claiming that admitting students solely on the basis of test scores was racially discriminatory” (172). Ha!
Asian parents make their kids learn musical instruments because the discipline to be good at those enables them to have the discipline to learn other subjects (127).
“Asian American teenagers—and Asian Americans on the whole—have dramatically lower rates of drug use and heavy or binge drinking than any other racial group in the US. Asian American girls also have by far the lowest rates of teen childbirth of any racial group (around 11 births per 1000 Asian Americans in 2010, as compared with around 56 for Hispanics, 52 for blacks, and 24 for whites). Because giving birth for teenage girls, and being convicted of a drug crime for teenage boys, are so highly correlated with adverse economic outcomes later, Asian Americans’ impulse control in these domains contributes to their disproportionate success” (133).
Self-esteem negatively correlates with success. “In a study of almost 4000 freshmen at 28 selective American colleges, Asians said they were the least satisfied with themselves of any racial group; blacks reported the highest positive attitude toward themselves, followed by Latinos, then whites, then Asians” (112).
“Studies strongly suggest that the sense of group pride instilled in students at historically black colleges and universities has contributed to their achieving better academic and economic outcomes” (77). So voluntary segregation could be a good thing as long as the facilities are just as well kept as the white facilities. Contemporary black urban culture “disdains studiousness” because it’s “acting white,” but “Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s important 2006 study found that this phenomenon did not exist at all-black schools” (222).
Not all successful groups emphasize learning or higher education. An example is the Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn (24).
America used to be a Triple Package nation (26). But now it is a youth culture which glorifies equality, self-acceptance, and spontanety (10-11), all of which are the opposite of the three things that make people succeed. “The successful are often the ones profiting from the people who live [in the moment]. Executives at America’s junk-food corporations are notorious for assiduously avoiding their own products” (143). “Here’s what America likes to tell Americans: Everyone is equal; feel good about yourself; live in the moment. Meanwhile, America’s successful groups tell their members something different: You are capable of great things because of the group to which you belong; but you, individually, are not good enough; so you need to control yourself, resist temptation, and prove yourself” (144).
“The American superiority complex of the late 18th century, and for a long time afterward, did not accept the idea that all men are created equal” (207). That’s because they’re not. If all people were equal, we’d be of equal heights, weights, IQs, and physical abilities. But we should all be TREATED as if we were equal, meaning there shouldn’t be discrimination. Except in competitions like sports and getting into colleges; there, obviously, the best athletes and brightest pupils should win or be admitted.
“Insecurity faded because of prosperity” (210). Interestingly, giving the poor welfare takes away their insecurity, which is one of the reasons why they don’t succeed at getting out of poverty. “Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans, [its] result has been the disintegration of the work ethic” - Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall of the Heritage Foundation (209). Welfare doesn’t eliminate poverty; it eliminates insecurity and keeps people happily poor.
“Overall, American students are among the world’s leaders in self-esteem; they’re also among the lower-scoring. In a controlled experiment, students who received self-esteem boosting messages did worse than other students. In another study, repeating praising children for how intelligent they were lowered their scores on standardized test questions—and made them lie when asked how many questions they’d gotten right. Moreover, the basic claim that sociopathic behavior is caused by low self-esteem also proved false. Racists and criminals do not ‘secretly feel bad about themselves,’ researcher Nicholas Emler found. Serial rapists have ‘remarkably high levels of self esteem.’ Meanwhile, psychologists report that kids raised on a high-self-esteem diet often suffer depression and anxiety as adults, along with higher rates of narcissism” (213). “The self-esteem movement erodes impulse control. ‘People with incredibly positive views of themselves,’ researchers have found, are more willing to ‘do stupid or destructive things’ and more likely to satisfy their own desires even when the ‘costs are borne by others’” (214).
“A study in CA found drug and alcohol abuse higher among ‘upscale youth’; adolescents in a suburb where the average family income was over $120,000 reported ‘higher rates of . . . Substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.’ Moreover, self-esteem parenting is much more common among wealthier Americans. AS the principal of a Silicon Valley prep school put it, ‘Avoiding discipline is endemic to affluent parents.’ Psychologists are observing an explosion of narcissism in America’s children, particularly among the better-ff. the so-called millennials—with their sense of entitlement, their expectation of being ‘CEO tomorrow,’ their belief that the workplace should adjust ‘around our lives instead of us adjusting our lives around work’—are for the most part not lower-income or minority youth. They’re the children of well-off white baby boomers” (216).
Argues that three traits make people succeed (8-11):
1. Superiority complex (belief in one’s ability to succeed)
2. Insecurity (drive to work hard to prove one’s worth or to acquire wealth and security)
3. Impulse control (self discipline, ability to control oneself, deferring gratification). “If people are made to do almost any impulse-controlling task—even as simple as getting themselves to sit up straight—on a regular basis for even a few weeks, their overall willpower increases. Suddenly they’re stronger in all kinds of unrelated activities that also require concentration, perseverance, or temptation resistance” (133).
These qualities tend to be high in immigrants, and dissipate by the third generation (2).
Here are the highest performing groups (not in any order):
Mormons (30)
Jews (51) have a median household income of $97,000-98,000 per year (53)
Huguenots (French protestants) (20)
Iranians (89) - median household income of $68,000 (56)
Lebanese - stats not given (57)
*Cuban Exiles which came to the US in 1959-1973 (36), but not the Cuban Marielitos who came in 1980. “The Cuban Exile community is mostly white, whereas a substantial fraction of the Marielitos and post-1990 New Cubans were black or of mixed race” (40).
*Nigerians - doing better than the national average but not one of the top income earners (42-43). Their median annual household income is $58,000, and the national median across all races is $51,000 (44). (I notice that Nigeria is one of the 5 African countries which has an average IQ over 83, the other four being Uganda, Eritrea, Morocco, & Sierra Leone)
*Indians (41, 95) excel in science and spelling bees (46-47). Indians have the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US at $90,500 per year (48).
Newer data on median household income by race in the US is different than the data listed in the book, but Indians remain the highest earners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
This site says Indian IQ is only 82.2:
http://aristocratsofthesoul.com/average-iq-by-race-and-ethnicity/
But explains their high income levels by say the discrepancy is probably due to selective immigration policies. (The 287 million illiterate adults in India are not the ones filling out immigration paperwork and now working high-tech jobs in the U.S.)
*Asians - particularly Chinese (Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodians don’t do well) (45). Asians “constitute 30-50% of the student bodies at the country’s leading music programs” (46). Chinese and Koreans excel in science and music (46-47). Asians are 5% of the US college-age population, but they make up 19% of undergrads at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Suspicious that they have all the same percentage. “If admissions were based solely on National Merit Scholarship and SAT scores, these percentages would be even higher” (47). “At CalTech, said to base admissions solely on academic criteria, nearly 40% of the students are Asian” (48). Taiwanese have the next highest household income of any ethnic group in the US (48).
Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan accepts students based solely on standardized test scores. . . . In 2013, the school’s new admittees consisted of 9 black children, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, and 620 Asians” (169-170). These Asians’ success can’t be explained by growing up in affluent households. “The Chinese parents in Sunset Park sending their children to Stuyvesant don’t tend to have PhDs; they’re more likely to be restaurant or factory workers” (171). “In 2012, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal complaint against the city, objecting to the vast underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics, and claiming that admitting students solely on the basis of test scores was racially discriminatory” (172). Ha!
Asian parents make their kids learn musical instruments because the discipline to be good at those enables them to have the discipline to learn other subjects (127).
“Asian American teenagers—and Asian Americans on the whole—have dramatically lower rates of drug use and heavy or binge drinking than any other racial group in the US. Asian American girls also have by far the lowest rates of teen childbirth of any racial group (around 11 births per 1000 Asian Americans in 2010, as compared with around 56 for Hispanics, 52 for blacks, and 24 for whites). Because giving birth for teenage girls, and being convicted of a drug crime for teenage boys, are so highly correlated with adverse economic outcomes later, Asian Americans’ impulse control in these domains contributes to their disproportionate success” (133).
Self-esteem negatively correlates with success. “In a study of almost 4000 freshmen at 28 selective American colleges, Asians said they were the least satisfied with themselves of any racial group; blacks reported the highest positive attitude toward themselves, followed by Latinos, then whites, then Asians” (112).
“Studies strongly suggest that the sense of group pride instilled in students at historically black colleges and universities has contributed to their achieving better academic and economic outcomes” (77). So voluntary segregation could be a good thing as long as the facilities are just as well kept as the white facilities. Contemporary black urban culture “disdains studiousness” because it’s “acting white,” but “Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s important 2006 study found that this phenomenon did not exist at all-black schools” (222).
Not all successful groups emphasize learning or higher education. An example is the Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn (24).
America used to be a Triple Package nation (26). But now it is a youth culture which glorifies equality, self-acceptance, and spontanety (10-11), all of which are the opposite of the three things that make people succeed. “The successful are often the ones profiting from the people who live [in the moment]. Executives at America’s junk-food corporations are notorious for assiduously avoiding their own products” (143). “Here’s what America likes to tell Americans: Everyone is equal; feel good about yourself; live in the moment. Meanwhile, America’s successful groups tell their members something different: You are capable of great things because of the group to which you belong; but you, individually, are not good enough; so you need to control yourself, resist temptation, and prove yourself” (144).
“The American superiority complex of the late 18th century, and for a long time afterward, did not accept the idea that all men are created equal” (207). That’s because they’re not. If all people were equal, we’d be of equal heights, weights, IQs, and physical abilities. But we should all be TREATED as if we were equal, meaning there shouldn’t be discrimination. Except in competitions like sports and getting into colleges; there, obviously, the best athletes and brightest pupils should win or be admitted.
“Insecurity faded because of prosperity” (210). Interestingly, giving the poor welfare takes away their insecurity, which is one of the reasons why they don’t succeed at getting out of poverty. “Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans, [its] result has been the disintegration of the work ethic” - Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall of the Heritage Foundation (209). Welfare doesn’t eliminate poverty; it eliminates insecurity and keeps people happily poor.
“Overall, American students are among the world’s leaders in self-esteem; they’re also among the lower-scoring. In a controlled experiment, students who received self-esteem boosting messages did worse than other students. In another study, repeating praising children for how intelligent they were lowered their scores on standardized test questions—and made them lie when asked how many questions they’d gotten right. Moreover, the basic claim that sociopathic behavior is caused by low self-esteem also proved false. Racists and criminals do not ‘secretly feel bad about themselves,’ researcher Nicholas Emler found. Serial rapists have ‘remarkably high levels of self esteem.’ Meanwhile, psychologists report that kids raised on a high-self-esteem diet often suffer depression and anxiety as adults, along with higher rates of narcissism” (213). “The self-esteem movement erodes impulse control. ‘People with incredibly positive views of themselves,’ researchers have found, are more willing to ‘do stupid or destructive things’ and more likely to satisfy their own desires even when the ‘costs are borne by others’” (214).
“A study in CA found drug and alcohol abuse higher among ‘upscale youth’; adolescents in a suburb where the average family income was over $120,000 reported ‘higher rates of . . . Substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.’ Moreover, self-esteem parenting is much more common among wealthier Americans. AS the principal of a Silicon Valley prep school put it, ‘Avoiding discipline is endemic to affluent parents.’ Psychologists are observing an explosion of narcissism in America’s children, particularly among the better-ff. the so-called millennials—with their sense of entitlement, their expectation of being ‘CEO tomorrow,’ their belief that the workplace should adjust ‘around our lives instead of us adjusting our lives around work’—are for the most part not lower-income or minority youth. They’re the children of well-off white baby boomers” (216).